A Night Without Stars (76 page)

“Roxwolf, I presume?” Chaing said cheerfully.

Ry Evine didn't think his heart rate had dropped below a hundred since he arrived on Macule.

Another planet! I'm on another planet—and I got to it through a wormhole!

After they all came tumbling through the wormhole along with the forty-odd machines and cargo pods from HGT54b, he had simply stood there on the cold grainy desert, turning around and around, drinking in the incredible sight.

Actually, the view itself wasn't so incredible. The terminus had opened in the middle of a brutish metamorphic desolation—all jumbled schistose rocks, some distant worn cliffs. Beneath his feet, the hard-packed granular dirt of the desert rippled away out to the horizon. Color was minimal, which he found strange, even though there was thankfully more variation than he'd endured on Lukarticar. The ground was contrasting smears of gray with some faint ridges of brown raked in. Above him the thin air produced a sky that was a uniform pale blue, devoid of clouds.

But still…an alien world.

Kysandra and Florian stepped through together, followed by another batch of membrane-wrapped machinery blocks that immediately toppled over, dislodging puffs of sand that hadn't moved in millennia. The terminus with its fuzzy gray edge was creeping across the ground, as a world away its counterpart slid along the full length of HGT54b. Then the last slab-like machine was through and the eye-twisting dimensional distortion surrounding the terminus underwent an even greater contortion, leaving the cylindrical wormhole itself standing on the desert, shining weak violet Cherenkov radiation across the sand.

“I didn't know they could do that,” Kysandra said.

“Inverting the generator location is a standard technique,” Demitri said. “Think of it like turning a sock inside out.”

“Neat trick.”

Ry finally paid attention to the row of amber icons lined up in his exovision. The air pressure was a third lower than Bienvenido, though that wasn't an immediate problem for his e-m suit. Background radiation was high. The force field could cope with that, but the e-m suit would have to filter radioactive particles as he breathed in the chilly air. It wasn't really designed to act as a radiation suit; at the current level his filters would only last a couple of days.

“What now?” Florian asked. He seemed somewhat less awed by being on a different world, and a lot more nervy.

“Now we get some engineeringbots and basic synthesizers up and running,” Valeri said.

So Ry had to stand around doing nothing while the ANAdroids broke open the crate containing a dozen engineeringbots and began to fuss over the inert forms. It was like being crammed inside HGT54b that first night, with nothing to do except wait. But this time…
alien world
!

Ry went for a short walk—the explorer striding out, making the important first-ever human footprints across this new land. There wasn't much to see or find. The desert was flat enough not to hide anything from sight. Some boulders were scattered about, a few larger than him. Nothing hid behind them. He started circling around, always keeping the glowing wormhole in direct view. After the first twenty minutes, he realized what else was missing. No vegetation—not even desiccated blades of grass or moss. He examined the edges of loose stones, then dug down into the sand a couple of times, trying to find something like lichen or mold. If there was any, he didn't recognize it.

But then, Macule had been dead a long time. Radioactive particles were everywhere—in the air, in the ground. And there was very little weather. The ice caps had sucked all the water out of the oceans as they extended their glaciers down to what had previously been this world's tropical latitudes. After that, the climate became super stable. It would take a major tectonic event to kick Macule out of its current stasis.

After an hour, he made his way back to the base. The ANAdroids were reassembling the first engineeringbot, the one out of twelve in the crate that needed the least work. A device with a barrel-shaped body one meter high, sprouting all kinds of plyplastic tentacles and a spindly sensor antenna. A cable from the wormhole's mass converter was plugged into it, charging the power cells. Three identical engineeringbots lay on the sand beside it, sections of casing removed so their components could be utilized.

As he approached he saw it start up, running through a self-check routine, testing the flexibility of its limbs as if it were in some kind of bizarre yoga class. Once it was ready, it went over to the storage crate it had come from and began to examine the eight remaining bots. Ry blinked in surprise; its tentacles were moving at such a speed they were a blur. The first inert bot's casing was soon opened, and the tentacles delved inside to continue the technological surgery.

The ANAdroids had moved on to a semi-organic synthesizer. Paula, Florian, and Kysandra were stripping the membrane packaging off a refinery the size of a small car.

“Are these going to work?” Ry asked.

“Not all of them,” Paula told him. “But by the time the
Viscount
left the Commonwealth, our machinery didn't have many moving parts. They're not mechanical, like Bienvenido's machines. It's all field manipulation and electronic processing. The closest thing we have to mechanics is the plyplastic those bots use to manipulate things. So it's mainly a question of molecular integrity.”

“We estimate seventy percent of the equipment in HGT54b is salvageable,” Demitri said. “That will be more than sufficient to construct what we need for the preliminary analysis of Valatare. And the surviving systems should be able to build more new manufacturing systems. This is all we need to begin a Commonwealth-level society.”

“That and time,” Kysandra interjected. “Which we don't have.”

“So when you get a batch of this stuff working, what are you going to build first?” Ry asked.

“We'll start with a simple habitat dome,” Paula said. “That'll give us a base. The refinery can process silicon direct from the sand, the synthesizer can churn out panels and a framework, and the engineeringbots will assemble it.”

He'd been mildly skeptical of her claim, but within an hour there were another three engineeringbots up and running—which was a fascinating exercise of exponential growth to watch as they repaired one another. The ANAdroids had the synthesizer functioning. Within three hours, two-meter hexagonal panels were being produced. The operational engineeringbots (now five) started fitting them together.

Six hours after arriving on Macule, Ry and the others were sitting inside the ten-meter-wide geodesic dome, eating a meal from their packs. A simple filter pump was pressurizing the hemisphere with clean air. Five of the panels were transparent, allowing Ry to see the ANAdroids and eight of the engineeringbots—the full reclaimed complement—working on the rest of HGT54b's cargo. The sun was already sinking behind the jagged horizon. He was surprised how the sight of it made him sleepy, but then he'd been awake for at least twenty-five hours.

“Do you think the Faller-seibears set off the second bomb after we left?” Florian asked as he activated his sleeping bag.

“Without question,” Paula told him. “They were heading straight for the
Viscount,
and they only had one purpose.”

“Anala would have seen it go off,” Ry said miserably. “Or the devastation it caused. But she wouldn't know we survived.”

“I certainly hope not,” Paula said. “That's what coming here was all about. Everyone has to think we're dead.”

As he was falling asleep, Ry wondered how Anala was doing, if her capsule had made it through reentry. If the recovery ships had picked her up okay. The kywhale was the biggest thing ever sighted in Bienvenido's ocean; suppose the Fallers had started eggsuming them? One of those leviathans could swallow the Liberty capsule whole. He closed his eyes, telling himself he had to stop these punishing thoughts.

When he woke up several hours after dawn, the scene through the transparent panels was completely different. The engineeringbots along with the ANAdroids had assembled another three domes—one considerably larger than the rest, which held the wormhole generator. Two engineeringbots were putting up a fourth, the largest yet. Five synthesizers and three refineries were up and running.

“We need more raw material,” Paula said as they ate breakfast. “The mineral content around here isn't particularly varied, and we really need a source of hydrocarbon.”

“Valatare?” Ry suggested. “I thought that's what the floaters were for, to supply Commonwealth industrial systems with the hydrocarbon gas in a gas giant's atmosphere.”

“That's a bit extreme for a first step,” Paula said. “When we do open the wormhole to Valatare, I want to be sending through a flock of sensor satellites to scan it properly.”

“Water would also be useful,” Valeri said. “There is a quantity bound up as ice particles in the desert sand, but melting it, then filtering it out, is a somewhat crude operation. Locating a frozen lake or stream would be preferable.”

“The synthesizers have produced some additional sensor systems for you two,” Paula said, handing Ry a sphere of silver-white plyplastic the size of his head. A second was given to Florian.

Just as Ry was about to ask
What's this?
the sphere's micronet linked to his u-shadow. Function graphics ran along his exovision. “A space suit? Wonderful.”

The sphere unfurled like a chrysalis into a slithery overall that looked a lot tougher than Ry's original e-m suit. He put it on and waited for it to contract around his limbs and torso. The hood that crept around his head was completely transparent. Monitor icons lit up green.

They trooped through the cylindrical airlock and Ry began to appreciate the real potential of the Commonwealth manufacturing machines. Four quad-karts were waiting for them, little more than a saddle and handlebars suspended on black composite struts between four thick tires with electric axle motors. But they looked quite tough enough to handle the rugged desert terrain.

Ry slung a leg over the saddle, unable to keep the grin from his face.

“You can use your u-shadow to accelerate and brake,” Demitri said, “but steering is purely manual. And we don't have skill memory inserts for driving, so take it easy out there.”

“Got it.” Ry was rather disappointed there was no manual throttle on the handlebars. “I'll manage.” He pointed at the low cliffs, eager to see a different aspect of Macule, however trivial. “I'll take north.”

“Okay,” Paula said. “I'll go east. Florian you take south, Kysandra, west. Remember, this is just a scout-around for material. If the ground gets difficult, don't try and get through. Just turn aside and scan a different area.”

Ry wondered if Florian also thought the Commonwealth woman to be very schoolmarm-ish. The way Paula spoke from some unassailable height of knowledge, how she expected everyone to do as she said—even Kysandra had stopped questioning her. Part of being an excellent officer was adopting a tone of authority; he'd learned that well enough in the regiment. He wondered if he should start questioning things, but her attempt to find some kind of benign alien armada imprisoned in a gas giant was so far beyond his comprehension he knew he'd just wind up looking foolish, and then do exactly as he'd been told.

Ego doesn't matter. I'm on another planet. And if everything goes right, I might even see Valatare close up—and possibly save Bienvenido, too.

He carefully ordered the quad-kart to accelerate and practiced the steering, braking, turning left and right. In a minute he was confident enough to announce he was ready.

The four of them sped off from the base. The sensors dotted across Ry's space suit and the quad-kart's struts scanned a wide swath of ground as he went, recording the mineral composition. It was mostly silicates with some traces of iron, but he began seeing veins of ice—presumably underground streams from a time before the nuclear winter.

Avoiding stones and boulders took up a lot of concentration. The cliffs were about six or seven kilometers from the domes, but he didn't risk throttling the quad-kart up past fifteen kph, and often didn't go more than five or six if the ground was particularly difficult. He certainly couldn't take a straight path.

“You know what I think?” Florian asked through the general link. “I think this is the bottom of an old ocean. I mean, there is nothing here, no signs of buildings or trees, not even rubble. And that cliff Ry's heading for, that could be the shoreline.”

“We've driven three kilometers,” Paula said. “The odds of finding ruins or artifacts in that distance are minuscule. Based on particle decay, the ANAdroids estimate the natives had their nuclear war over thirty-five thousand years ago. The chance of any structures remaining is minimal. The war, the climate shift, entropy—these are not our friends.”

“
Viscount
survived three thousand years in the cold,” Florian said, “and that was just one ship. Something of this civilization must be here.”

“It will be, but badly decayed to the point it may be unrecognizable. And remember, you shouldn't judge the previous civilization by human standards. Some aliens the Commonwealth encountered are very alien indeed. And not everyone goes down the industrial-mechanical route we took. There are some who have very biologically oriented societies; they literally grow their own houses and implements. In which case there will be nothing left but dust.”

“It would be difficult to grow nukes, wouldn't it?” Ry asked.

“Good point,” Paula admitted. “They certainly had machines somewhere.”

“We should have brought some ge-eagles with us,” Kysandra said. “They'd have scanned half this desert by now.”

“If we don't find what we want, we'll manufacture some,” Paula said.

Ry was so intent on evading all the natural obstacles littering the desert that he didn't notice the slim indentations until the quad-kart had been diving over them for twenty meters. The sensors weren't reporting anything interesting, so it took him a while to realize what he was seeing. The quad-kart braked sharply at his command.